Never Trust an Elf

by Robert N. Charrette

  Frowning, Kham turned to Rabo. "Ya said dis guy was good, Rabo."

  "He is, Kham. he is. Must be a lot of ice."

  "Well we're gonna get iced if he ain't outta dere soon wit what we need."

  "He'll make it," Rabo insisted. "Trust me."

  "It's yer butt, too."

  Rabo thought about that for a second. "Come on, Chigger. Move your virtual butt."

  Silence descended on the room, save for the intermittent flurries of tapping from Chigger's fingers flying across the keyboard of his cyberdeck. The seconds dragged into minutes; long, sweat-producing minutes. Kham nearly jumped when Scatter announced, "The mage has moved on."

  They all breathed a collective sigh.

  "We were lucky," Neko commented.

  Scatter turned eyes of deep, dark mud on the catboy. "Nothing of the sort. My spirits protected us. They shielded us from the Andalusian wage mage, blinding her eyes and ears to our presence."

  "Way to go, Scatter," Ryan said, giving her a double thumbs-up.

  On the other hand, Kham thought, it could be that the mage just decided to go to the can. They had no way of knowing if Scatter had done anything at all. They still hadn't really gotten anywhere.

  Then Chigger gave a moaning chuckle, the same queer victory signal he'd uttered when he'd secured copies of the IDs used by the company that serviced Andalusian's phone system. The decker dropped into the real world and said, "Got a loc."

  "Don't keep it ta yourself. Pop it over ta Rabo's screen and get back ta grabbing anyting dey got on da crystal."

  The decker mumbled something and resumed his tapping on the cyberdeck. His screen still churned with agitated shapes, but the monitor on which Rabo had been following his progress blanked for a second. The new image that appeared was a diagram of the facility. Kham recognized the layout of the buildings, so he knew that the red dot identified their current position. A red line zigzagged across the compound to a flashing pip that should be the area where the crystal was stored. It was two buildings over. Kham didn't like it; too many of the areas on the diagram were dark.

  "What's dis drek? How come so much is blacked out."

  "Must be a partitioned system," Rabo said. "Different parts of the facility are under different security protocols."

  "Why didn't Chigger cut into the main program?"

  "There may not be one. Depends on how paranoid the security chief is."

  "We got any ting on how secure dat area is?"

  Rabo ran the keyboard, causing a series of windows to pop up and vanish in rapid succession. The stuff went by too fast for Kham to make sense of the data. At last Rabo hit the Enter key with a flourish and said, "There. That's what we got."

  Yellow dots appeared at scattered locations of the diagram, some brighter than others. The clusters at the gates and in the security headquarters building Kham took to represent guards. Surprisingly, there were only a few along the route Chigger had shown them; the decker had done his job right.

  "Alarms?"

  "Chigger'll ride cover."

  "Good enough." It had better be. If the decker couldn't override the alarms as the rest of the team proceeded, they'd bring all of Andalusian's security down on their heads. "Now just where is dis place we're headed?"

  "Main assembly building. Ground floor's mostly open space and automated assembly lines. They'll still be running, which means supervisors, but we'll miss all that if we follow Chigger's route. We'll be coming in along an access tunnel into Basement Level One. The rock's three levels down on Number Four."

  "Underground. Yes. That is where we must go." Scatter chuckled. "The spirits speak of secrets hidden beneath the earth."

  Geez, don't need this mumbo-jumbo drek. If only he had been able to get a real magician. Kham tried to ignore her. "How come the security's so light?"

  "Perhaps they are running the purloined letter gambit," Neko suggested.

  Without Kham noticing, the catboy had joined them at the console. That meant nobody was watching the outside. Kham sent Ratstomper; he'd rather have the cat-boy's advice than 'Stomper's. Besides, with 'Stomper out of the conversation, Scatter wouldn't have quite so much support among his guys for this round. "Okay, catboy, what's dis letter stuff?"

  "I meant that perhaps they conceal the importance of what they hide by not hiding it at all."

  "No," Scatter said sharply. "There are magical defenses."

  Kham didn't doubt that, even if he didn't believe Scatter had definitely determined their presence. "Ya gonna be able ta deal wit 'em?"

  "My spirits are strong."

  "Right."

  They skimmed Chigger's data filchings for what they could use and laid plans to further penetrate the Andalusian facility. Kham started to feel a slim hope that they might actually pull it off. Half an hour later, they left Chigger to dig for files and ride Matrix overwatch, and Ryan to guard the decker while he worked. They made it down to the basement without a hitch, but a sentry at the entry to the tunnel required a bit of special attention from Neko. The catboy amazed Kham with the stealthiness of his stalking and the sureness of his strike. The guard never knew what hit him, but then Kham didn't either. One moment the uniformed man was standing there. The next minute he had crumpled to the ground. They stowed the fellow in a utility closet, and waited for Chigger to signal that he had overridden the lock. Then they headed down the tunnel.

  The entry to the assembly building's basement had a manual lock as well as an electronic one. Chigger cut the latter, but he couldn't do anything about the former. Before Kham could regret having left Ryan with the decker, Neko stepped up and began working on the lock. His skill in opening it was another surprise from the catboy, leaving Kham to wonder why he had needed Ryan on the crew at all.

  Lights and occasional noises from some of the rooms indicated that there were still active company folk on this level, so they moved through it as quietly as possible. That wasn't too hard. The late-night wage slaves were snugged by their consoles in isolated cocoons of light. They had no interest in the corridors, or anything beyond their little worlds of chair and workstation, for that matter. Besides, it was easy to sneak along on carpeted floors.

  Once aboard the freight elevator, Kham pressed the button marked BL4 and they started down. Chigger overrode a signal from Level Three, ordering the car to proceed without responding to the suit or wage slave calling for an elevator on that floor. Reaching Level Four, they soon found new reason to be cautious. Most of the illumination panels were out and those that remained lit were functioning at reduced output.

  "Economy measure," Ratstomper suggested tentatively, almost as if she didn't believe it herself.

  Kham reached up and lifted the panel covering one of the darkened fixtures. Like its covering, the bulb was intact. In the first office they found, Rabo used the terminal to contact Chigger.

  "Cut off," the decker told them. He didn't know who had done it, but he was sure that it wasn't an authorized reduction.

  Kham cherished the thought that an employee might be responsible, until they found a guard sprawled at the first corridor junction, his neck broken from behind. The conclusion was inescapable; someone else had also made an unauthorized entry into the facility.

  Two minutes later, in the fitful light of the darkened corridors, they saw who.

  There were three of them. They were moving cautiously, too, and even more slowly than Kham's crew. They were rough boys—mercs or razorguys, judging by their looks. A professional team, too, judging by their stealth and the seamless coordination of the drill they used when passing doors and corridor junctions. The problem was that they were between Kham's guys and the rock and headed in the same direction.

  They might have been shadowrunners, but Kham had never seen more than two runners who went for the same look. Though each of these guys was different from the others, their overall appearance showed a striking similarity. Kham thought about the twinned cyberguys they'd run with; maybe look-alike was the new style.

>   All of these rough boys were big—bigger even than Kham. They looked a little oddly proportioned; their heads seemed too small for their bodies, like caricatures of professional bodybuilders. They wore what looked like close-fitting helmets and their heads were protected from behind by a jutting ridge from their backpacks. Wire-thin aerials poked up past their sleek pates, and other wires protruded at irregular intervals along the sides of the backpacks. They were blatantly armored with extensive matte-finish chrome and they were dripping with weapons—from holstered pistols and knives to what looked like Ceres tribarrel machine guns. These guys were pure heavy metal from hell.

  The last of the three rough boys stopped and turned slightly. His position under one of the lit ceiling panels gave Kham a good look at him. Much of what Kham had taken for armor were cybernetic replacement parts, but what struck the ork most was the guy's face. What he could see of it. The little flesh that wasn't plated over looked gray and shriveled. Tubes snaked from his nose and slithered over his shoulder to disappear into a junction on the backpack's ridge, and the light from above glinted coldly on the gleaming chrome orbs of his eyes

  "Who da hell are dese guys?"

  "Not security," Neko whispered.

  With awe in her reedy voice, The Weeze added, "They're carrying three times the ordnance we got." Ordnance was ordnance, and a single bullet could kill you just as dead as twenty. These cyberized bozos were here and interfering in Kham's run; that was all that mattered to him. "Scatter, why didn't you spot 'em?"

  "They were not there." the rat shaman said, pouting.

  "Well, dey're here now. You saying dey teleported in, like from da Enterprise? Drek, wouldn't dat be sweet."

  Scatter gave him a withering stare. "No teleport; they have no magic."

  "You sure? Dey been hiding from you."

  "No magic," Scatter insisted. There was a frantic note in her voice, which was also rising in volume. "None!"

  "Geez," Kham hissed. "Keep it down, ya old bat." "Lay off the shaman, Kham," Ratstomper whined. "She's already saved our butts plenty."

  The crew quieted down, but ii was too late. With slow, machine-like precision, the heavy metal intruder swiveled his head to stare into the darkness between the light fixtures where Kham and his runners were crouched.

  20

  Before they could react, the rough boy had them covered. His tribarrel hissed softly as the barrels spun at speed on their silenced bearings, but for some reason he didn't fire. Kham was relieved; this was no place for a firefight with opponents armored so heavily they looked almost made of metal. Since only one had tumbled to their presence, there was a chance that he and the guys could take these bozos down if their fire was fast and accurate enough. But Kham's guys would take losses. They'd blow the run, too. Kham knocked Ratstomper's hand away from her holster before she could get a grip on her gun.

  The metal man, apparently satisfied that Kham's team offered no threat, snapped the snout of his weapon up into carry position and began to mumble to himself. Kham dared to breathe once more, but only until he realized that the tribarrel was built into the guy's arm. These guys were some kind of super soldiers. What the frag had he and the guys bumped into?

  The metal man started toward them, moving quietly, for all his bulk. The scent he gave off was mostly machine oil, cordite, and plastic, but underneath it all, Kham caught a whiff of something rotten and decaying. The guy stopped a few meters away. A good leap might put Kham inside the sweep of the tribarrel. The idea was gutsy, but not bright. That kind of cowboy move might work against an ordinary opponent, but it would be suicide against the coiled-spring speed of this metal man.

  "WHAT—" The sound of the guy's first word reverberated so loudly in the corridor that he stopped speaking immediately. He hummed to himself for a moment, then began again, his voice much softer. "You are not Andalusian personnel. What are you doing here?"

  Kham managed to find his voice; no one else in his group seemed ready to speak to this guy. Hostile wouldn't get them anywhere, so he tried to make his tone casual and friendly. He also hoped he sounded confident, but he doubted it. "Could ask ya the same, chummer, 'cause ya sure ain't on da Andalusian staff." The hard line of the rough boy's mouth twitched down at the corners. "I am not here to answer questions. I have the gun, you will answer my questions."

  "Eliminate them," the second one said. The other two had come ghosting up behind the first.

  "Negative," said the third. "Elimination entails unacceptable reduction of mission success-probability due to noise factor. Beta has already lowered probability by two percent with speech volumes."

  "What are these guys?" Ratstomper wailed, voice cracking. "Some kind of fragging robots?"

  "Silence!" commanded number three. Something in the manner of the other two suggested that this one was their leader. "Interference in our mission will not be tolerated. If your talking sufficiently raises the probability of discovery, your elimination will no longer threaten our mission, and you will be eliminated."

  Ratstomper looked bewildered.

  "Da chummer just told ya ta shut up, 'Stomper. Do it." Kham returned his attention to the metal men. "We don't want no trouble wit you chummers. None of us is Andalusian, so we ain't got no feud. Ya do yer biz. we do ours, and everybody's happy."

  "You will remain here. You cannot be allowed to interfere with our mission."

  "Don't want ta."

  "Beta, move them out of the corridor and remain with them."

  A gesture with the tribarrel pointed out the chosen room, and Kham nodded to his guys that they should go along. Everybody moved quietly, pointedly keeping their hands away from their weapons. Kham carried his AK in his left hand, and held his right up at chest level, well away from the butt of either the holstered automatic or that of the magnum protruding from his belt.

  Their captor waited until the door to the corridor was closed before turning on the room lights. The place was some kind of electronics lab, but Kham didn't know enough about such things to even guess at the uses of most of the equipment. He was sure that none of it would be useful as a weapon. Neko tried to put a counter between him and the metal guy, but a shake of the rough boy's head, emphasized by a pointing tribarrel, brought the catboy back around to the front. Neko gave Kham a shrug, then sat with his back against the counter and shut his eyes. Kham was damned if he didn't think the catboy was taking a nap.

  Time dragged on. Though their captor never seemed jumpy, he was always alert, reacting to their slightest movements, but only bringing the tribarrel to bear when somebody's hand got too close to a weapon. One by one, the guys got tired of standing and sat down; all except for Scatter, who stared venomously at the metal guy.

  After about twenty minutes, Kham felt the pulsed flashes of heat from the earpiece of his headset. It was the signal that Chigger wanted to communicate with them. He would have simply ignored the signal, but their captor turned cold chrome eyes on him.

  "Explain the signal."

  Somehow this guy knew that Kham was getting a message. Denying it wouldn't heip. "Car's overparked."

  "Unlikely. Try again, smart boy."

  Kham considered keeping his mouth shut, but he wanted to know the reason for Chigger's call. If there was trouble, he doubted that Andalusian security would make fine distinctions between the two groups of intruders. "It's a call from our decker. He wants ta talk ta me."

  The metal guy blinked once. Kham couldn't be sure about those featureless orbs, but he thought the metal guy's gaze was roving the room. Then the man pointed at a workstation and said. "Order your decker to input to this station."

  "Why should I? What's in it fer us?"

  "Your lives," the metal man replied with the ghost of a smile.

  He was probably right. The Andalusians would have them if they ignored Chigger, and this rough boy would waste them if they ignored him. Some choice. Kham did as ordered.

  "Whatcha got, Chigger?"

  "Got an alert on the system. Routine
now, but the trigger seems to be somewhere near you. You guys blow it?"

  "Naw. We're just sitting around."

  The metal man reached past Kham and switched off the voice input. "You will order your decker to penetrate the security system and set off false alerts."

  "That'll wake up da whole place."

  "It will reduce their security's effectiveness by spreading their effort. They will not know which alarm is real and which is false."

  "Yeah, so?"

  "It will hide our efforts."

  "Ya mean yer efforts. We ain't in dis togedder."

  "Kham." Neko said softly, eyes still closed, "if Andalusian security concentrates their efforts here, we are in as great a danger as our large friends are. More, perhaps. I suggest you do as he says. Confusion is profit to the shadowrunner."

  Only when you're in charge and know what's really going down, Kham thought. Still, there was a certain logic in the argument. Kham relayed the metal guy's orders to Chigger.

  While Kham was convincing Chigger to do as the metal man said, the rough boy popped open a panel in his chest plate and pulled out a jack. Plugging into the console, he said, "You will also have him disable the alarms at the locations I transmit."

  "I suppose it can't hurt." Us, anyway. Who knew what kind of IC Chigger'd run up against? Kham hoped it wouldn't be bad. "When ya got dat done, try dis," he said, telling Chigger what their captor wanted. Then he cut the connection, leaving Chigger to do what had to be done.

  "We have achieved a significant increase in success probability. The random elements have provided a Matrix operative with access to portions of the inner facility system," their captor said. Though he was talking, he did not seem to be addressing them. Kham and his guys could hear him, too.

  They waited some more.

  Scatter twitched like she was seeing something. Then Kham heard distant gunfire: short, controlled bursts as the characteristic moan of a tribarrel answered a scattering of single shots. It didn't last long. Within less than a minute, the door to their jail slid open, heralding the return of the other two metal men. Seeing one carrying the crystal in a padded harness slung over his shoulder, Kham thought his eyes would bug out. Drek, the guy was as strong or stronger than a troll; it had taken three orks to manhandle that same rock into the elves' van.